 |
 |
|
By Perry Brass
On Wednesday, March 4, 1999, a good man died. He was Harry A. Blackmun,
a Republican lawyer from Minnesota who was appointed to the Supreme
Court by Richard Nixon.
Blackmun was known for his quiet, unassuming nature. It was taken for granted that he would remain a loyal Republican conservative during his whole quiet stay on the Court. During his 24 years on the Supreme Court, he surprised many people. He became an often alienated, lone voice on the Court, identifying with the poor, the marginalized, the overlooked. He stood for retaining, at least until it is no longer necessary, Affirmative Action. He voted that the children of aliens deserved access to public education like any other children living in the United States.
Although the vote on Roe was 7 to 2, his publicized opinion, which took him a year to write (Blackmun was famous for being a cautious opinion writer; he rejected anything that resembled "shoot-from-the-hip" legal thinking), became the center for anti-abortion demonstrations everywhere. He received constant death threats and tons of insulting letters. He once lamented, "Think of any name, and I've been called it in these letters." A quiet man who rarely ate out in restaurants, he became used to being heckled in public and confronted by picketers with signs calling him "Baby Killer" and "Murderer." Nevertheless, he remained on the Supreme Court, holding on even after his health had given way, to keep Roe v. Wade from being overturned. In 1989, in a case involving a Missouri law's right to restrict abortion, the Court in a 5-to-4 decision, voted to uphold that law. Blackmun, then 80, said in a dissenting opinion delivered to what had become a Reagan-stacked Court: "I fear for the future. The signs are evident and very ominous, and a chill wind blows."
When Blackmun retired in 1994, his own replacement was Stephen Breyer, a Federal appeals judge, who had been widely known as a supporter of abortion rights. This means that, at least for the present, abortion choice rights are still firm in the United States, unless a radically conservative President attempts to overturn the Supreme Court's legal judgment—an agenda that much of the Christian Right is completely in favor of. In Roe v. Wade, Blackmun got to unite two of his own deepest interests, medicine and the law. He had thought about becoming a doctor while going to Harvard on a scholarship presented to him by the Harvard Club of Minnesota. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard with a degree in mathematics. He later attended Harvard Law School, and for ten years was the legal counsel for the Mayo Clinic, the medical and research clinic in Rochester. Allowing him to use his legal mind in a medical setting, Blackmun said this was the happiest period of his entire life. This period also set into motion his feeling that there could be a more medical model for morality; that there are private relationships, such as doctor-patient, which should not be opened to the various winds of public opinion.
As a Supreme Court justice, he started to see this model of private
relationships working towards other opinions he framed.
An example is, in later life—in a marked change from his earlier conservative Republican background—Blackmun became increasingly openly liberal. In 1986, dissenting from the Reagan administration's prepackaged conservatism, he wrote in the case known as Bowers v. Hardwick (where the police in Atlanta, Georgia, literally kicked open a man's bedroom to find him in bed with another man), that individual freedoms in a land like America would have to extend to people whom even the Supreme Court might want to overlook, just as for centuries it had overlooked blacks, women, and other minorities. In short, that the private nature of human relationships cannot be sundered, no matter how "unpopular" they may seem to others. As a lone, dissenting voice, he said in Harwick v. Bowers, "The fact that individuals define themselves in a significant way through their intimate sexual relationships with others suggests, in a nation as diverse as ours, that there may be many 'right' ways of conducting those relationships, and that much of the richness of a relationship will come from the freedom an individual has to *choose* the form and nature of these intensely personal bonds.
"In a variety of circumstances we have recognized that a necessary
corollary of giving individuals freedom to choose how to conduct their
lives is acceptance of the fact that different individuals will make
different choices. . . . The Court claims that its decision today merely
refuses to recognize the fundamental right to engage in homosexual
sodomy; what the Court really has refused to recognize is the
fundamental interest all individuals have in controlling the nature of
their intimate associations with others."
Recently, the Supreme Court of Georgia has overturned the case that resulted in Bowers v. Hardwick, although the Supreme Court has not re-opened the case. The Court, as a whole, is still "squeamish" about dealing with gay rights, with the gay right to privacy, and with upholding for gay men and lesbians the same rights as other citizens. But this does not deny that Harry Blackmun was a good man, who in his own, thoughtful way, resisted the country's lurch backwards towards the Right. If you've go grown up after Roe v. Wade, you have no idea what even the word "abortion" meant in the years that preceded it. It was the evil secret in the lives of many Americans, a secret as fearfully approached as homosexuality, and anything that linked sexuality to daily life. One of my own most vivid memories concerning this was a call I got, late at night, in the late 60s, when I was living in the East Village. It was from a "friend of a friend of a friend," a young man who only knew that I was living in New York in the "open" East Village. He was in college in New Jersey, and a "girl he knew" was in trouble (translation: his girlfriend). Did I know "a doctor who could help with"—he finally got the word out—"an abortion"? I had to tell him that I didn't know one, and he would have to continue looking. He would have to continue calling anyone, including a complete stranger like myself, to refer him to someone else who might be able to "help" him. And what kind of "help"? Maybe a back-alley clinic where medical standards were minimal or nonexistent. Where this girl could have ended up one of the 50,000 women a year who either died or were seriously injured due to illegal abortions, called in those days "coat hanger" jobs because quack abortionists used a coat hanger to scrape the uterus. No matter how you feel about abortion, and how safe you might feel as a gay man from its consequences, I still think about that call. That someone's life could have been in the balance of my "referral." We now live in what many want to feel is a completely different age—and we don't have to think about abortion rights anymore, even as fundamentalist lunatics bomb women's clinics or murder doctors compassionately caring for women who make abortion choices themselves. Someone is always out there for "your own sake," to take choices away from you. I have known this all my life. And the terrible thing is that while these self-righteous people are doing things for you—"for your own sake"—while they're praying over you and killing you at the same time, there are fewer people who will speak up for you. So men like Harry Blackmun still don't come around every day. Perry Brass's latest book is How to Survive Your Own Life, recently nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Religion and Spirituality. He can be reached through his website, www.perrybrass.com. |
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's appointment helped allow Blackmun to retire from the Court
© 1997-99 BEI